


Something Borrowed

by SegaBarrett



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/M, Italy, Marriage, Mind Games, Power Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:15:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29139141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Hannibal takes Bedelia to Italy.
Relationships: Bedelia Du Maurier/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12
Collections: Shotgun Wedding Flash Exchange





	Something Borrowed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FictionPenned](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FictionPenned/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Hannibal, and I make no money from this.

Italy was a beautiful place, and Bedelia had been there before but never like this. Never with Hannibal lingering at her shoulder and smiling that smile that told her everything that she needed to know.

And what she needed to know was that Hannibal could do anything to her, really anything, and not get caught, and the fact that he had decided to make her his wife meant that his game was going to involve her hanging on the hook just that little bit longer than was comfortable.

She supposed that she should be afraid, but her heart couldn’t conjure it up because she had crushed her heart a long time ago.

When they were alone, Hannibal would put his hands to her head and tilt it slightly, and it was the tenderness in the motion that sent a chill up her spine – an electrical impulse through her body. She wondered if he was weighing her head, trying to see what kind of a dish it would be a good addition to.

Sometimes he would run his fingers up her ankle, and she wondered if he was considering chiseling them into silverware. Did he do that, she wondered, or was everything consumed in the moment?

***

She began to walk the grounds of the beautiful home he had found them, the most gilded cage she could have ever constructed for herself. She would suck in the air and savor the figment of being free, a way to look through the bars and out into the open, the sunlight dancing on her skin.

She really looked the blushing bride, didn’t she? She had never gotten the chance – she was too married to her work, was the phrase men would always use, which was of course, just another way of saying “bitch”. 

And maybe she felt it, too, if the blush came from the blood draining through her cheeks, every time that she imagined how Hannibal could nick an artery, accidentally on purpose, and pepper the pure white of the pillows on the marriage bed with little specks of red. 

But Hannibal had always favored Botticelli over Pollock, after all.

***

On the first night after they became Lydia and Roman Fell, at least on the outside, Hannibal lay beside her on the bed and looked her over.

“You are examining me,” Bedelia managed, and she couldn’t keep her eyes off of him. She would need to see the blow coming.

“What is it that you would like me to see?” Hannibal asked in response, and Bedelia noticed that he wasn’t looking at her.

Bedelia had asked Hannibal once, when he had been sitting in session, what exactly it was that he did it bed.

He had chuckled and, after a long, trailing pause like footsteps against sand in the desert, simply said, “sleep.”

And that was what he did now, with one eye open.

She knew, because she watched him with both of her own for the entire night.

***

He was bleeding in her bed. Blood pooling like rose petals all around him, dotting and streaking the pure sheets.

Bedelia wanted to scream, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t find the words.

If someone had broken in and killed Hannibal, what did that mean for her? As his wife, now, all of her enemies would have become her own. And she hadn’t heard a word because she had been sleeping, sleeping soundly.

She had allowed Hannibal to slip into ear and whisper her asleep. Singing to her the way he once told her he had sung to Mischa.

The way he would sing to any small thing he wished to protect, the broken bird lying on the street.

But Hannibal would not want to repair it to watch it fly, but to cage it, to watch it flap around and try to figure out how it had found itself in this predicament. 

Hannibal had told her in session that he was obsessed with how much the eye could stand to observe itself.

And now he was bleeding in her bed, and as she ran her hand down over his chest, finding a knife plunged between his breastbone and collarbone, her fingers gripped it and pulled back.

Whether to find out whether he was really dead, or to make sure of it, she didn’t know. It was like walking in a dream.

His eyes opened and Hannibal Lecter smiled as he climbed out of bed, covered in blood and rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“Goodbye, my love,” he said to Bedelia. “The honeymoon may need to wait to continue.”

He turned and walked to the window and opened it, climbing out with not another word.

There was a knock at the door.

“FBI!” Then, “Carabinieri! Open up!”

The blood-covered knife felt right in her hand. And as she looked down at it, slid around the handle was a diamond ring.


End file.
